Eliya Abuna

Gewargis d'Beth Abuna came, as the last name says, from the house in which up to the first generation after unification of the "Patriarchate of the plains" with the Pope in Rome, the charge of Catholicos-Patriarch of the Chaldean Church based in Alqosh had been.

Thereafter, he worked in various places in rural Alqosh and in 1908 returned to the urban community of Assyrian Catholics.

In 1912, Mar Shimun XIX entrusted him with the Diocese of Taimar, in the area around Van, in what is today's southeastern Turkey.

After the killing of Shimun XIX, Mar Eliya directed the burial of the Patriarch on 6 March 1918 in the cemetery of the Armenian Church of Khosroabad (Khosrova) and was one of the Co-consecrators of Mar Polos Shimun XX on 14 April 1918 in Urmia.

The following year, in 1924, he left the Assyrian Church of the East and returned to the Chaldean Catholic Church, where he was appointed Patriarchal Vicar for the diocese Aqra; this service took less than two years.